Popular quotes about Childhood! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Childhood hunger in America is as much a paradox as it is a tragedy. Why, in the wealthiest country in the world, should hunger darken the lives and dreams of 12 million children and their families? I believe that, when Americans learn the facts and understand how their involvement can make a difference, banishing childhood hunger will be a national, local and personal priority.
Martin SheenGenius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
Charles BaudelaireIn childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science.
Richard DawkinsPlay is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a childs soul.โโข โPlay is the highest level of child development . . . It gives . . . joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world . . . The plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life.โโข โChildren are like tiny flowers; they are varied and need care, but each is beautiful alone and glorious when seen in the community of peers.
Friedrich FrobelI think it shapes it in very deep ways that you don't entirely understand. Rainer Maria Rilke said there are two inexhaustible sources for poetry. One is dreams, and the other is childhood. I think childhood is an inexhaustible source of your becoming who you will be and certain deep feelings are set inside of you.
Edward HirschIm from Connecticut. My Mom is an army brat, and my Dad is a navy brat. My childhood was fun. My parents are still together. My childhood was pretty carefree.
Cassie VenturaMy father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer, but, my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood, because it was full of gladness and good humanity.
Roberto BenigniA kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child.
John Steinbecka daughter's love for a kind father ... is mixed with the careless happiness of childhood, which can never come again. Into the father's grave the daughter, sometimes a gray-haired woman, lays away forever the little pet names and memories which to all the rest of the world are but foolishness.
Constance Fenimore WoolsonThrough reading, I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. And, through books, I got to travel the world and the universe. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way - through the power of words - to change the world.
Sonia SotomayorThe truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.
Sonia SotomayorI've been following what's happening in Colombia because it's the country of my childhood.
Barbet SchroederI shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?
Rachel KushnerWe Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we're barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.
Ivan TurgenevIt is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever.
Lucy LarcomI was raised in a Catholic household and went to a Catholic school, and my childhood brain perceived medieval Catholicism as an action movie: There's this crazy omnipresent guy who can destroy you at any moment.
GrimesMy childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.
George EliotTo describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood.'
Pat ConroyIn all times and in all places--in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France,Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden--the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue--that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals.
Louise J. KaplanThe structures of neoliberal modernity do more than disinvest in young people and commodify them, they also transform the protected space of childhood into a zone of disciplinary exclusion and cruelty, especially for those young people further marginalized by race and class who now inhabit a social landscape in which they are increasingly disparaged as flawed consumers or pathologized others.
Henry GirouxChildhood has it's own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.
Jean-Jacques RousseauHollywood parties not only confuse me, but they often disillusion me. The disillusion comes when I meet a movie star Iโve been admiring since childhood. I always thought that movie stars were exciting and talented people full of special personality. Meeting one of them at a party I discover usually that he (or she) is colorless and even frightened. Iโve often stood silent at a party for hours listening to my movie idols turn into dull and little people.
Marilyn MonroeOne of my fondest memories from childhood is of looking at a globe with my father. "What's the biggest country?" he'd ask me and my sister. We'd spin the globe around and guess. . . . The globe brought me a sense of wonder and adventure. I wanted to go to those other places and see how people did things differently. And, many years later, when I did visit other countries, I took my father's interest and fascination with me. When we plant the seeds of fascination and respect for other people, we are teaching tolerance and peace.
Charlotte Sophia KaslA lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.
Tea ObrehtI attended Sunday School and then church with my father and mother throughout my childhood.
Leverett SaltonstallLet's say a startup is hot. It ships something great, and it achieves success. Thus, it's able to attract the best, brightest, and most talented. These people have been told they're the best since childhood. Indeed, being hired by the hot company is "proof" that they are the A and A+ players; in fact, the company is so hot that it can out-recruit Google and Microsoft.
Guy KawasakiI can truly say, after an experience of seventy years, that all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed. . . . The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion.
Elizabeth Cady StantonParenthood brings profound pleasure and satisfactions--the unparalleled pleasure of caring so intensely for another human being, of watching growth, of reliving childhood, of seeing oneself in a new perspective, and of understanding more about life.
Ellen GalinskyI spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.
Stanislav GrofNo days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.
Marcel ProustMy earliest childhood memory is of my father going crazy when the Giants won the World Series in 1954. He started whoopin' and hollerin' and jumpin' up and down all around the living room. I started crying because he scared me to death.
Henry Louis GatesMemory's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon on puberty, all that sentimental candyfloss. The next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go.. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you'd hoped were forgotten.
Alan MooreFor years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood
Harriet Ann JacobsChildhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.
P. D. JamesI dont remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.
Renzo PianoMy childhood was never great. We moved from place to place a lot. There were times when we had no definite place to stay. So, a basic level of security was not always there. Therefore, when you finally make it out, and you become who I am, you're humbled by the memories of those situations.
LeBron JamesMy study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, for all the science and sport involved in it.
Vasily SmyslovAll patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey.
Marilyn FrenchWhole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians - childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on - suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books.
Lloyd deMauseI've got childhood friends who are working for non-profit foundations, or who are running for state senate and doing things that actually do fight evil in this world. And what am I doing? I bang on some drums in a rock band. I try to tell myself that by doing that, I'm fighting evil - which is completely absurd. Music is not equipped in any way to fight against anything. Other than, I guess, it could fight against silence.
Greg Saunier